Architect of Russia’s Political System Under Putin Is Reassigned

Tuesday

Dec 27, 2011 at 12:01 AMDec 28, 2011 at 8:04 AM

Vladislav Y. Surkov had become a lightning rod for a rising generation of Russians who are calling for an end to political manipulations.

MOSCOW — The Kremlin on Tuesday announced the reassignment of Vladislav Y. Surkov, the architect of the highly centralized political system that has come under waves of protest from middle-class Muscovites over the last month.

Mr. Surkov, a former advertising prodigy, coined the term “sovereign democracy” to describe his system, which preserved the electoral process but hollowed out institutions capable of challenging the Kremlin’s power. He created an array of political tools — the youth movement Nashi, the United Russia party and the overwhelming force of fully controlled television — that helped Vladimir V. Putin consolidate his authority during his first two presidential terms.

The last several months have exposed many of those tools as outdated, and Mr. Surkov had become a lightning rod for a rising generation of Russians raised on the Internet, who are calling for an end to the manipulations.

Aleksei L. Kudrin, a former finance minister, called Mr. Surkov’s transfer a “serious bid to renew the political system,” and said it had been agreed upon by both President Dmitri A. Medvedev and Mr. Putin, the prime minister.

“I consider him one of the designers of the system,” Mr. Kudrin said of Mr. Surkov in an interview with the Kommersant-FM radio station. “Now the system is being reconsidered. Other organizers are needed, with other views on the political system.”

Mr. Surkov, 47, will now oversee modernization and innovation as a deputy prime minister, but will take no role in domestic politics. His position, deputy head of the presidential administration, will be filled by his rival Vyacheslav Volodin, a top United Russia official and longtime Putin loyalist who is vacating a spot as deputy prime minister.

Mr. Surkov’s low profile and extraordinary clout have earned him the title “gray cardinal,” an object of fascination and occasional loathing in the capital. Asked by a journalist from Interfax on Tuesday why he was leaving, Mr. Surkov first answered, “Stabilization devours its own children.”

Then he laughed, and said he had overstayed the job and had requested a reassignment. Asked whether he would take a role in settling down the protests, Mr. Surkov said no.

“I am too odious for this brave new world,” he said. He then summed up his achievements at the reporter’s request.

“I was among the people who helped President Yeltsin realize a peaceful transfer of power,” he said. “I was among those who helped President Putin stabilize the political system. I was among those who helped President Medvedev liberalize it.” He added, “I hope I did not undermine my employers and my colleagues.”

The news prompted discussion among an array of political players who have all found themselves dealing with Mr. Surkov over the years. Many said he was serving as a symbolic sacrifice to the growing ranks of protesters.

“We forget, sometimes, that in Europe, a person can come to an institution and assume its form,” Marat Guelman, a longtime political operative, wrote on the Web site of Ekho Moskvy radio. “Here, it’s the opposite: the institution takes the form of the person. And the departure of Surkov from the president’s administration is a sign that the president’s administration will stop handling domestic politics.”

One of the few people to openly challenge Mr. Surkov in recent years was the billionaire Mikhail D. Prokhorov, who called a news conference in September to denounce him for manipulating parties that were supposedly independent of the Kremlin.

On Tuesday, Mr. Prokhorov played down the Surkov news. Recent days have brought a flurry of appointments of familiar Putin officials moving between offices in the Kremlin and the Russian White House. “They are just moving people from one place to another,” Mr. Prokhorov said. “If they’re serious, I wonder why instead of sacking a series of ineffective officials, they are making these strange rearrangements and appointments.”

It is unclear what concrete changes will flow from the decision. A top Communist Party official, Ivan Melnikov, told the newspaper Vzglyad that Mr. Volodin’s selection signaled a shift in the direction of “a more harsh model for the coming political battle.” Others said it tips the balance in favor of liberal reforms announced last week by Mr. Medvedev, which would begin to loosen the tight controls Mr. Putin installed a decade ago.

Mr. Surkov has said that centralizing power in the Kremlin was a matter of survival after the chaotic pluralism of the 1990s, but acknowledged more recently that “centralization has reached the limits of its capacity.” Early this month, reacting to the first of several large protests, he said a new party was urgently needed to accommodate the demands of “annoyed urban communities.”

Barely two weeks had passed when, in an interview with Izvestia, he offered a strikingly positive assessment of the demonstrations, saying the best part of Russian society had come out for the first event on Dec. 10. A moment of tectonic change had arrived, he said. “We are already in the future,” he said. “And the future is not calm.”

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